“Party on!”

Wanna party?! This is a photograph of an ‘entertaining’ evening in Koyukuk in 1900, just at the start of the Alaska Gold Rush. Koyukuk has a troubling history. When gold was discovered in Alaska some wily entrepreneurs figured to cash in big time in Alaska. They chartered five steamboats and packed them full of building material – but not a lot of food. The steamboats plowed up the Yukon River and then the Koyukuk River where five small cities were constructed. It was a great idea except for one flaw: the stampeders expected to live off the land. It didn’t work. Alaska does not have the wild game population other states have and as I stated in my novel Noah, “By the middle of December, before winter had officially started, the Syndicate knew it was in very deep trouble. It was simply a matter of adding up how much food they had in all five cities, dividing it by the number of people who had to be fed and the answer was March, at least two months before the river broke.” Then there was made stampede, in the dead of an Alaskan winter, to get OUT of Koyukuk and find food before the men starved to death. As you can see from this photo, these men had absolutely no inkling of the unmitigated disaster that was about to befall them. [See my books at https://authormasterminds.com/master-of-the-impossible-crime.]